Damages

In my return to blogging a few weeks ago, I talked about my diabetes diagnosis and how recovery has been going. I mentioned the tapering off my medications, the weight loss, and how good my blood sugar levels have been. All of that is still true: I'm off insulin and managing things through meds alone; I've lost forty-six pounds now; my average blood sugar over the last month is 103, over the last two weeks is 98, and my a1c at my last checkup was 4.8. In a lot of ways, I'm healthier than I've been in almost a decade, and feel better than I have in maybe longer than that.

Despite all that though, there are damages.

Being in diabetic ketoacidosis as long as I was caused permanent nerve damage in my hands and feet. Nothing extensive or severe, but I'll get pains in my hands and feet occasionally, especially my feet, sometimes for days at a time before it just vanishes. My hands same feet will also "fall asleep" faster than they used to, and once they go numb it'll take longer than it used to for that to pass.

I also get unpleasant sensations in my chest now. I say sensations because it isn't pain, but I'll feel a throb sometimes, or a dull ache, or some warmth or something, and it isn't like localized to one place. Don't worry, it's been checked out, it's fine; I'm told it's partly due to interactions between the five different meds I'm on now and partly due to the fact that it takes me longer to digest food now because the nerves in my stomach are damaged, and that sometimes doesn't mesh well with my acid reflux.

I'm also dealing with diabetic retinopathy. There's been some damage to the blood vessels in my eyes, which has affected my vision. Things are blurrier than they used to be, especially at a distance. I can stay very easily, very clearly watch TV without a problem of I'm sitting on the couch, but if there's any subtitles or other words on the screen, I can't read them. To use the program guide, I have to get up and stand in front of the TV to see it clearly. I can't get treated for it right now either; I'm on my wife's employer-provided vision plan, but apparently treating this is covered by health insurance, not vision. Go figure. Again, it's not something serious, I'm still good and functional, but yes, there are damages.

That segues pretty well into another big set of damages, the financial damages. Fifteen thousand dollars in hospital bills, a few of which I'm disputing, some I just have to pay, with monthly minimum payments of almost five hundred bucks. Which made as well be a million, they're both equally possible. It's pushed me to start a ko-fi page, linked to this blog on the right there, to ask for help. It kills my pride to have to do that, and I can barely bring myself to actually share the link to that anywhere, but there it is.

Then there are the medications. As I mentioned, I'm on five of them now, and they all have side effects. The big one is that metformin, my main diabetes drug, can (and does) cause diarrhea, which makes it a hell of a thing to have to take twice a day when you also have IBS, let's just leave it at that. In addition to that, every single one of my meds lists dizziness, drowsiness, and lightheadedness as side effects, so as you can probably imagine, I'm dizzy, drowsy, and lightheaded. A lot.

Maybe the most extensive damage of all, though, has been psychological. Other than the usual ways everyone gets sick, I've never been sick before. And except for some sprains, twists, and a deep cut that needed stitches when I was a kid, I've never been injured. So to suddenly find myself laid up in a hospital bed, attached to two different machines and three separate IVs in the ICU, being told by nurses I was probably a day or two away from being on a coma? And to then find out my new condition makes me a prime vulnerable target for the pandemic that was about to take over the country? Yeah, there's been some serious mental damage from that. I've been scared constantly. I'm fighting it and it's starting to fade a little finally, but that fear, that new dreadful sense of mortality laying in that hospital for five days have me, is very much still there.

Yes. I'm doing a lot better than I was.

But there are damages.